Testing
The Thermalright HR-03 heatsink was tested on an nVIDIA 7800 GTX PCI-e video card in several different configurations. Baseline tests were conducted with the stock nVIDIA coolers for reference.
A single HR-03/7800 GTX was tested with a 92mm Panaflo H1A fan at three different speeds and also without a fan in passive cooling mode. Two HR-03’s were used during testing on dual 7800 GTXs in SLI mode. The ambient room air temperature was maintained at 23°C ±0.5°C. The single GPU was loaded by running R-T HDR IBL and the dual card, SLI configuration was loaded using 3DMark06.
- SilverStone Zeus 750W power supply
- Asus P5N32-SLI Deluxe nForce4 SLI Intel edition motherboard
- Pentium Extreme Edition dual core 955 (3.46 GHz at 1.22 Vcore)
- Thermalright Ultra-120 CPU cooler
- (2) Corsair CM2X512-8000UL DDR RAM
- (2) nVIDIA 7800GTX 512 MB 550/850 video cards
- WD1200JD SATA HDD
- Sony DVD
- Windows XP Pro with SP2
- nForce 91.31 drivers
92mm Panaflo (FBA09A12H-1BX)
- Hi speed 2,600 rpm
- Med speed 1,900 rpm
- Low speed 1,200 rpm
The following data is presented for comparative purposes only. Your actual results may be different depending on the variables unique to your system (video card, overclock, ambient temperature, case air flow, temperature monitoring, etc).
As you can see from the previous results, the Thermalright HR-03 does an excellent good job of cooling the 7800 video cards whether it is a single card or two cards in SLI. The HR-03 delivers outstanding performance when supplied with airflow from a directly mounted fan. Without a fan the HR-03 performs very well if the cooler’s heatsink can be positioned in the air stream of a nearby fan such as the Ultra-120 CPU cooler on our test rig. Even with no fan and no indirect airflow, the HR-03 ran only a few degrees warmer than the stock coolers. Very impressive results — but not surprising considering the source!
